‘No, he’s gone to buy us some lunch.’
5
AFTER LUNCH MOY took his clipboard and set off to get to the bottom of this non-case. He went into the deli and stood waiting, mesmerised by a pair of flies fucking on a finger bun. The assistant, a yeah-but child-woman in leggings, was talking to an older friend who kept checking to see that her baby hadn’t escaped from its pram.
‘It’s so predictable, every morning, right at the start of the twenty-five zone,’ the shop girl said. ‘Standing there with his little zap gun. As soon as he’s got one, there’s another.’ She stopped for breath. ‘I mean it’s not like anyone’s actually speeding, is it? A few k’s, so what?’
Moy looked at the burnt pies in the warmer and wondered exactly what it took to become a local. The Moys had farmed Cambrai for years before the soil had given up on wheat. But they’d never really become townies. Locals. Although his dad, George, had become a Guilderton fixture, a bolt rusting in place on the fringes of what passed as wheatbelt civilisation, he himself no longer had any claim to citizen status. He’d forfeited that years before when he’d left for the police academy. You never got it back.
Now he was a curiosity, a ‘boomerang’, although they’d never say that to his face. An in-between person who’d severed his roots, who had no chance of returning to the soil from which the Moys, and Guilderton itself, had sprung.
He looked at the assistant, trying to catch her eye.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘he only ever makes it home two or three times a week.’ She turned to Moy. ‘Can I help?’
‘A plain pie with sauce.’
She smiled at her friend and asked, ‘What time’s netball tomorrow?’
‘Five forty-five.’
‘Who we playing?’
‘Fortescue. The inbreds.’ The friend laughed then studied Moy as if to say, you don’t come from Fortescue, do you? Or more likely, I couldn’t give a fuck if you do come from Fortescue.
The girl looked at her baby again, darted a final stare at Moy and left the deli. The shop girl was stabbing his pie with the sauce bottle, apparently injecting it with litres of White Crow as she wiped sweat from her cheeks with her forearm.
Moy knew exactly who they’d been talking about. Jason Laing with his little zap gun, getting his leg over as Guilderton watched, gossiped and passed judgment on a man who should have known better. A not-so-young constable who had a wife, a kid and one on the way; straying towards the backblocks of Guilderton East, shamelessly parking his patrol car outside a government semi-detached rented by the new kindy teacher six months out of uni.
The girl handed him his pie. ‘That all?’
‘Thanks.’ He could feel the sauce pooling in the bottom of the bag. It was only a matter of time before it split open. Still, she hadn’t done it on purpose…couldn’t have, surely? There was the rattle of the till, and sweaty change thrown across the counter.
‘You didn’t see a kid on his own, early this morning?’ he asked.
She looked at him as if he was stupid. ‘Pardon?’
‘A kid was abducted from the back lane, four shops down—behind Mango Meats.’
‘You’re the police?’
‘Detective Sergeant Bart Moy.’ He waved the pie that prevented him getting to his ID.
‘I got in around seven.’ She shrugged. ‘No one in the back lane when I opened.’
‘No car?’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t hear any noises? Screaming, arguing?’
‘No.’
Moy hoisted the pie. ‘Could I have a new bag?’
She sighed, and her lips came together. As she transferred the pie to another bag she asked, ‘What, he was actually kidnapped?’
But he didn’t see the point of telling her. ‘Perhaps.’
As he ate his pie in front of Turner’s Shop he watched the mums with their well-worn prams, strolling in T-shirts and tight pants. He studied every roll of cellulite, every bulge, and thought, fuck. He remembered a local telling him you only became ‘one of us’ when you died in Guilderton, or at least an adjacent paddock. And he wondered what that meant—about going, or staying?
Christ, what have I done? he thought. Watching some old fella with one foot in a thong, one in a slipper.
He lifted the pie to his mouth but it was so bloated it split open, lukewarm meat and cold sauce running over his hands and wrist. He dropped the carcass into a bin, found a tap and rinsed the offal from his hands.
The whole staff of Walker and Sons was standing in a line in front of their shop. Fire drill? Maybe they were posed for some sort of promotional photograph. Heads followed him like a row of sideshow clowns.